


The Bird Watcher

by kariye



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Episode Tag, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-04
Updated: 2012-05-04
Packaged: 2017-11-04 20:21:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/397842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kariye/pseuds/kariye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rodney’s standing in the middle of the woods, face turned to the sky, with a pair of binoculars mashed against his eyeballs when some idiot runner mows him down. “Hey,” the man drawls from above him, all loose limbs and tanned skin. “Did you know people use this path to run?” and Rodney snaps back, “Excuse me? That was a black-throated blue warbler. Do you have any idea how rare that bird is here?” and Atlantis helpfully supplies: data: dendroica caerulescens; data: subset: probability of extinction: 99.3%</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Bird Watcher

**Author's Note:**

> Repost from LJ.
> 
> Last Man tag. All information on the warbler comes from The Cornell Bird Guide. Some dialogue borrowed directly from the episode in question, which is not mine; also, paraphrasing of the same. Heaps of gratitude to both secretsolitaire, whose fandom this is not even, and livrelibre, who I only just met and dragged into my world, for stepping in and betaing this for me. And, as always, to perverse_idyll, without whom I wouldn't post anything, even when she's not actually betaing.

For forty-eight thousand years he doesn’t dream. He wasn’t meant to, lest he consume more energy than she had to give, lest Sheppard arrive after over five hundred lifetimes and be condemned to spend the only one he has left here in a forsaken city. 

When the gate activates, the sensors scan for Sheppard’s chip, and after finding it, trigger Rodney’s program. If he had fingers to uncurl and arms to stretch to the sky, he would. Instead, he arches into the sensors and tries to find his voice to call out to Sheppard whom he hasn’t seen in twenty-five or fifty-three years or forty-eight thousand. 

This takes exactly seven hundred and thirty-eight thousand microseconds, or nearly three quarters of a second, and in the seventh hundred and thirty-nine thousandth microsecond, he finds reason to be extremely grateful that he doesn’t have a body. Because if he did, his head would be exploding right now as the city’s sensors pile millennia of information onto him, like fireworks, as if desperate for someone to look after years of silence. It’s not really that. It’s that tapping in as a component of the sensor program makes all the data accessible to him at once, in a rush, and his own program, illogically reacting as a human mind, is overwhelmed by the onslaught. 

data: air pressure: 1563.55 hPa and falling  
data: equation: │v│= √(u2 + v2 + w2)   
image: bird over desert  
image: empty glass on table  
data: │v│= 48.6 and increasing  
data: energy 6% remaining  
image: city sinking into the oceans  
image: subset: seashell  
image: wall of city, inner  
data: one life sign  
data: location: gateroom  
data: identification: John Sheppard  
data: elanoides forficum  
data: subset: extinct  
data: subset: nearest earth relation: elanoides forficatus  
data: subset: common name: swallow-tailed kite  
data: subset: probability of extinction: 98.93%  
image: open gate  
image: subset: life forms leaving through gate   
data: subset: life forms: unknown  
data: subset: last known inhabitants of city  
data: sound: physeter macrocefela: keening  
data: subset: location of physeter macrocefela: Lantea  
data: subset: time: 62,000 years ago  
data: subset: common name called by expedition: Rodney’s whale: Sam  
data: city: 62% inaccessible to humanoid life form  
data: subset: lower levels: 97% inaccessible to humanoid life form  
image: woman  
image: subset: identification: Madison Miller-Khoury  
data: temperature outside city: 322.3 K  
data: subset: temperature inside city: 313.1 K   
data: star, nearest: sun: hydrogen shell: expanding  
data: subset: star, nearest: sun: temperature: dropping  
data: subset: star, nearest: sun: core temperature: rising  
data: solar system: M45-981: engulfed by star, nearest: sun  
data: solar system: P9X-111: engulfed by star, nearest: sun  
data: solar system: P2Y-224: engulfed by star, nearest: sun  
image: solar system: P2Y-224: gone  
image: star, nearest: sun: orange halo  
image: Rodney McKay  
image: Rodney McKay: location: lab  
image: Rodney McKay: location: mess  
image: Rodney McKay: location: John Sheppard’s room  
image: subset: Rodney McKay: location: John Sheppard’s room: John Sheppard absent  
image: Rodney McKay: location: Teyla Emmagan’s room: Teyla Emmagan absent  
image: Rodney McKay: location: Ronon Dex’s room: Ronon Dex absent  
image: Rodney McKay: location: Samantha Carter’s room: Samantha Carter absent  
image: Rodney McKay: location: Rodney McKay’s room: Rodney McKay staring out window  
image: Atlantis  
image: Atlantis: empty  
image: subset: infirmary: patient with fever: year 2 of Earth expedition  
image: bird: wing broken  
image: subset: bird: dying  
data: subset: bird: cause of death: heat  
data: subset: bird: cause of death: lack of water  
data: subset: bird: chaetura pelaganum  
data: subset: extinct  
data: subset: bird: nearest Earth relation: chaetura pelagica  
data: bird: common name: chimney swift  
data: subset: probability of extinction: 98.88%  
image: bird: flying  
image: puddle jumper: John Sheppard: flying  
image: puddle jumper: Rodney McKay: flying  
image: Atlantis: flying

and somewhere else, John calling out on the radio: “This is Sheppard. Is anybody there?” 

Rodney catches a millisecond’s glance of Sheppard waving his hand over control consoles, looking wary and sweaty and so damned welcome, before Rodney recoils from information overload and yanks out of the sensors. It’s ground zero at an explosion of cluster bombs, a killing electrical voltage snapped into every synapse of his mind. But there’s a clock ticking now, forty-eight thousand and one, and counting, so he plunges in again and fires back at the city.

image: Rodney McKay: holding head  
image: Rodney McKay: location: puddle jumper: exploding  
image: subset: Rodney McKay: location: puddle jumper: ball of fire  
data: subset: sound: shriek of metal twisting  
data: subset: sound: explosion  
image: Rodney McKay: holding head  
image: Rodney McKay  
data: subset: sound: silence  
data: subset: sound: word: please

He’s not as quick at this as the city is. It takes him almost a full second to flash those bytes at her. As soon as he does, the city responds.

query: image: Rodney McKay: location: puddle jumper: exploding: unable to locate in memory banks  
query: image: subset: Rodney McKay: location: puddle jumper: ball of fire: unable to locate in memory banks  
query: data: subset: sound: shriek of metal twisting: unable to locate in memory banks  
query: data: subset: sound: explosion: unable to locate in memory banks  
calculation: probability of occurrence: 0%  
data: subset: images: unable to locate  
data: subset: data: unable to locate  
image: jumper bay: empty  
data: subset: time of image: current

By the time Rodney rolls his nonexistent eyes in exasperation and thinks, “No, no, that was a metaphor. I didn’t mean I had actually exploded in a jumper. That was what my head feels like,” and “What do you mean there are no puddle jumpers anymore? Who took them?” and the city flashes back: 

data: word: metaphor: meaning: a figure of speech in which a term is transferred from the object it ordinarily designates to an object it may designate only by implicit comparison or analogy  
image: John Sheppard: flashing thumbs up

and Rodney thinks, “You would pick him,” the him in question is opening the door to the outer world.

image: eastern view of city  
image: subset: mostly submerged  
data: subset: material of submersion: sand  
image: desert

Through the city’s audio, because he is everywhere and nowhere, Rodney listens to John say, “ All right. This is either the most elaborate practical joke of all time or I’m in serious trouble here,” before he speaks into his radio, identifying himself.

Rodney finds his voice, rusty, his vocal chords disintegrated: “Sheppard, is that really you?”

“McKay,” John replies. He sounds relieved and slightly pissed off, although that may be fear showing. At forty, Rodney wouldn’t have admitted such a thing – except for the times when he did, loudly and to the world – but at sixty-five, he’d learned that he was manly enough to show a little fear. 

“Oh, god,” he says. “It worked. I can’t believe it really worked. You’re here.” And maybe it’s because he’s still thinking like a human that he feels a happy little bite of joy inside. 

“Where are you? What the hell’s going on here?” John demands.

The problem is that Rodney doesn’t know himself. Well, he knows the answers to the questions that John’s probably asking because they’re the ones he programmed himself in response to and he probably knows a whole lot more than that, but he hasn’t processed it yet. He’s a computer program, turned himself into a goddamned computer program, and he’s still thinking like a human. 

“Do me a favor and go to the hologram room,” he tells Sheppard. He needs Sheppard’s touch to reinitiate the hologram program this first time.

+++

Atlantis’s timekeeping program tells him it’s been four days since he put Sheppard into the stasis unit. He activates his hologram and appears as far down in the city as he can. He tries to get into the levels that were always below water, but the nearest he can manage is the center desalinization tank, the largest of them. He pops into existence where there should be water churning in and out in an endless fish gill, but where instead there is only silence and golden sand under his feet. 

It’s not really under his feet. He reaches down, as he has so many times in the last five days since Sheppard stumbled through the gate in confusion, and his fingers pass through the sand, dematerializing. 

There are seashells down here, and time-broken fossils of whales. The more fragile smaller bones of fish seem to have long disappeared. Rodney brushes his hand over the surface of a scalloped shell, pale creamy pink-white, and imagines the ridges covering its surface. It’s the kind of thing Jeannie would have collected as a girl, collected and placed on a windowsill for Rodney to touch absentmindedly as he read.

There shouldn’t be shells inside Atlantis. The city must have broken somewhere before the seas dried up. Rodney supposes it doesn’t matter now.

+++

“It’s a desert out there,” Sheppard yells into the radio before he gets to the hologram room. “What the hell happened?”

“Uh-oh,” says Rodney. “I wasn’t programmed for this variable.” But it does explain some of the images that Atlantis has been sending him, and he wonders how on earth he missed it, how McKay didn’t see this happening when it should have been so obvious 48,000 years ago. 

image: eastern view of city  
image: subset: mostly submerged  
data: subset: material of submersion: sand  
image: desert  
image: southern view of city  
image: subset: mostly submerged  
data: subset: material of submersion: sand  
image: desert  
image: western view of city  
image: subset: mostly submerged  
data: subset: material of submersion: sand  
image: desert  
image: northern view of city  
image: subset: mostly submerged  
data: subset: material of submersion: sand  
image: desert  
data: subset: time of image: current   
image: bleached bones  
image: subset: dead reptiles  
image: subset: dead birds  
image: subset: dead mammals, small  
image: subset: dead mammals, large  
image: desert  
image: subset: puddle  
image: subset: pond  
image: subset: lake  
image: subset: ocean

“Oh my god.” Rodney focuses on the sensors that patrol the perimeter of Atlantis and finds the array that spans outward into the sky, sees the enormous orange ball of the sun hanging low above the city. It fills the visible sky and casts a red haze over the edges of blue. Nothing moves out there, not a plant in the wind or a bird in the sky. The world is only yellow grit.

Some things are really meant to be seen with the naked and boundless human eye. Not for the first time since becoming a computer program – albeit an extremely sophisticated one – Rodney chafes at the inherent limitations. 

+++

Rodney’s in the woods with a pair of binoculars. He’s standing very still. Around him in the early morning, the chirping is bright and noisy under the heavy shade of the trees. He tilts his head and listens for the unattractive buzzy notes of the warbler he’s tracking. It would be the find of the summer if he managed to snap a photo of it – the other birders will never believe it, but he’ll prove them all wrong with his genius – because it’s not supposed to be anywhere near here, not for hundreds of miles. 

There is it again, four notes, a shrill “zoo zoo zoo ZEE,” to the west, and with his eyes on the trees, he turns to the right and walks slowly as he listens for its call. There’s a flash of blue. He’s so close he can taste the anticipation in his mouth, and he’s fumbling for the camera with one hand and holding the binoculars with the other when the world spins away from under his feet and he lands on the forest floor with a squawk that makes the birds chatter and fly away. 

“You complete moron!” he says, and pushes up at the man tangled into his legs. “Why don’t you watch where you’re going, and try being a little more quiet about it too. Do you have any idea how long it took me to get that close to the warbler? I’ve been out here since 5:15 this morning tracking it, and it’s not like I have some sort of life signs detector that can just—”

“Life signs detector?” the other man says, and, “Sorry, you just appeared out of nowhere, and I was going too fast to avoid you when I came around the corner of the trail,” and “You do know that this is a runner’s path, right?”

“What, like I can’t use it now?” Rodney snaps back, wondering where on earth he came up with ‘life signs detector’ from. “Get off me.” The man’s weight isn’t too uncomfortable, but the roots warping into his back are. “My lumbar is very sensitive, you know. I’m sure you’ve started me down the road to spondylolisthesis with this. You could be setting back ornithology by years if I end up in surgery. I’m probably up for the Roger Tory Peterson Award Promoting the Cause of Birding this year. Give me another ten, and it could be a Nobel.” 

He looks up at the man and sees amused eyes and sweat on his face, and god, it’s not fair that he’s not even just a little bit blotchy the way Rodney gets when he runs, however inadvertently. “Why are you still here?” he says.

“Uh, sorry?” The man lifts himself off Rodney gracefully and offers him a hand up. Rodney takes it. “You should be,” he huffs. 

“So,” the man says. He looks like he wants to shove his hands into his pockets, but his black runner’s shorts don’t have any. “I’m John Sheppard.”

“Yes, yes,” Rodney says, “Dr. Rodney McKay, and now I’ve lost my warbler entirely, thanks to you.”

“Yeah. Sorry about that,” he says again. “But you were kind of smack in the middle of the path.”

Rodney waves this off. “I was in the middle of a scientific discovery. You have no idea how rare that bird is, at least here,” he says, and he receives this in his mind:

data: dendroica caerulescens  
data: subset: probability of extinction: 99.3%

+++

It’s amazing to see John. Rodney had a tremendous rush to get here, to create his own program before he died, and then the slow realization of what it meant to be frozen in time while the world around him aged, and then this infinity of a wait that crawled on past in the blink of an eye. Four years of Sheppard out of 65 and 48,391, and yet those years stand out more vividly than all the weight of the rest combined.

data: .000083%

And it comes down to one moment, which is the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard, because how can one small thing, one man’s disappearance, change an entire city, world, galaxy. It can’t. Rodney had a few bad moments there, back on Earth some 48,402 years ago, when he doubted. The city pushes at him:

image: Rodney McKay: location: corridor 3C: speaking: do you trust me  
image: John Sheppard: yes

Atlantis has an argument with him:

data: timestamp: Earth year 2003  
image: gate opening: expedition stepping through  
image: gate opening: John Sheppard stepping through  
data: subset: Atlantis: systems engaging

and somehow, the rush of the city to light up for its new gene-bearer, the awakening of long-dormant systems, the uncertain tread of military boots against her floors – these things feel like the city’s happiness, even though Rodney knows she doesn’t feel things in such a human fashion. He thinks maybe it’s him, the way he interacts with her even as a computer program himself: that her own electrical impulses of stored memory interact with his programming, send him snaps of energy and information that react like something new, like something alive. That he perceives it this way because once upon a time he was human.

This is the way Atlantis feels now as John steps through the gate again, as if she could fly once again, if feels is the right word. John has come home to her, and she feebly tries to light up for him. Rodney yells at her to save her energy.

But, god, it’s amazing to see John, now. He wants to reach out to him, to shake his hand or slap him on the back, or clutch him so hard to his chest that he leaves bruises. Forty-eight thousand years, he tells him. “Give or take a few.” 

For John it’s not been so long. He saw Rodney a few hours ago, and only the shock of Rodney’s age startles him. He has no idea what Rodney’s done, and maybe Rodney’s not going to tell him, not all of it, how hard he’s clung to this one thing, the only thing he could do. That makes it sound small, doesn’t it, like changing the entire course of history knowingly is nothing. Perhaps it is; perhaps this was always the way it was going to happen, even though it was never the way it was supposed to. 

“The future doesn’t map itself out on a straight line,” one of his professors once said. He was speaking to an entire class, not merely for Rodney’s benefit, because honestly, if you didn’t already know that, you had no place being in that class. “Now Newtonian physics would say that if we knew every single variable, if we could know where every particle would be and how it would interact with every other particle, then we could know the future until the end of the universe. Quantum mechanics blows that idea out of the water. Because we can’t know the positions and velocities of every – or any – particle, only the wave function. But that too becomes unpredictable.” 

Atlantis helpfully supplies:  
data: equation: │ΰ › = ∑│ί ›ΰί  
ί

When he tells John how far into the future he’s travelled, John clenches his jaw. The city stores the image in her memory banks. Rodney is aware of everything she does. 

image: John Sheppard: location: corridor 12B

She fits it in seamlessly with the millions of others she has of him, every second of every day that he was in Atlantis for four years. 

calculation: seconds: 1.32ˆ8

John stalks down the corridor. “McKay,” he says, his voice a growl of frustration. “How long are we talking about?”

“Oh,” says Rodney. “Seven to eight hundred years? A thousand tops,” and John stares at him incredulously and says, “Whoa. That’s your plan? You want to put me on ice for another thousand years?”

Rodney remembers, although he cannot feel the sensation of it, what it’s like to rush. It’s such a fragile thing. “Well, sure. When you’re already dealing with 48,000, what’s another few hundred?” 

“I have to get back.” There’s a drop of sweat making its way down Sheppard’s temple. 

Rodney nods. “I know. Come on, we’re going to the stasis chambers. You’ll have to wait it out there.”

He thinks: I’m going to get you home, John, because it was never meant to happen this way, and Atlantis echoes:

image: stargate: open  
image: John Sheppard: stepping through gate into gateroom

then, 

query: image: Rodney McKay: stepping through gate

and Rodney says, “No. I’m not leaving.” 

John turns to him. “What’d you say?”

Rodney smiles. He wonders what it would feel like to smile a younger smile, a forty year old smile like Sheppard’s on a face unlined, with skin not tight but not sagging either. But then, he wonders what it would feel like to touch anything. He reaches out to the wall and brushes his hand over it, through it.

“Nothing,” he tells John, and John asks, “So what happened to everyone here?”

+++

Radek never leaves. He comes into the labs earlier and earlier, and leaves earlier and earlier too as his sleep patterns change, and sometimes Madison drops by the corner of the physics lab he’s staked out for himself over the years only to find him nodding off with some Ancient device in his hand. But he’s still brighter than the rest of the morons on staff put together, and when Rodney’s around, back from his endless tinkering in the city’s systems – “For the thousandth time, Rodney, I told you not to make alterations in her,” Radek berates him. “If you do it one more time, I’m going to shut your program down!” – he pesters Madison to keep an eye on Radek.

Madison rolls her eyes. “Yes, Uncle Mer.” She sounds like her mother, puts her hands on her hips like her mother. “You do realize that I’m older than you were when you left the city, don’t you? You’re really not supposed to be ordering me around.” Her grin is that of someone twenty-five years younger, the lines on her face, to Rodney’s sensors, those of a thirty year old. The way they were the last time he reached out and patted her cheek, just to annoy her because she annoys him on principle, a psychologist for Christ’s sake. Even if she did make it all the way to Pegasus despite that handicap. 

“Don’t even try to shut me down,” Rodney tells Radek. “You might be able to turn off my hologram, but I’ll still be here in the mainframe. You can’t touch that.”

“No?” Radek smiles, and it is crafty despite the ninety-year old creases around his mouth. “It’s obvious you designed yourself to lie entirely dormant and inert. Your program takes energy, Rodney. Trace amounts right now, but in a true energy crunch, even that would be too much. You wouldn’t put the city at risk. I know you, my friend.”

Rodney’s hologram ripples, a sudden flicker. “You won’t shut me down,” he says, trying to project confidence. 

“I might if you keep harassing me.” Radek waves his stylus over his whiteboard and new data appears. He stares at it, pondering. Atlantis flashes an image at Rodney.

image: John Sheppard: location: labs: tapping foot on Rodney McKay’s stool

and Rodney thinks at her, “do you understand the meaning of ‘lost in the future?’ I can’t bring him back any sooner” and she withdraws from his conscious mind as always when he thinks at her. 

data: does not compute: searching for meaning

She’s not yet used to the still-human patterns of his simulated brain’s thinking.

“Hah!” Rodney says to Radek. “As if this is harassment. Clearly you miss me more than you admit. Besides, I haven’t touched anything important in the city’s systems. I can’t get at them, even if I wanted to. She won’t let me. So there’s no reason to shut me down.”

Radek snorts. “You do remember that the original understanding you had with Lorne was that you’d upload yourself, run the initial tests to see if your program was correct, and then shut down the program before you – the original you – went back to Earth, yes?”

Twenty-five years ago when Rodney first become this program, Radek used to say not “the original you” but “the real you” to refer to the flesh-and-blood man who created the program. 

Rodney asks Madison, “Is your mother coming out here anytime soon?” and Madison replies, “Uncle Mer, why do you still ask that? I know you have a perfect computer memory, and I know that you know that Mom hasn’t been here since before your funeral. She’s not coming back.” Rodney also says, this time to Radek, “Even if you shut me down, I’m programmed to reinitiate upon certain events,” to which Radek responds, “Of course, such as when Colonel Sheppard steps through the gate, and I suspect that’s the only one,” and Rodney doesn’t say anything, so Radek says, “Rodney. I will not terminate your program without your permission or a good reason.”

“You’ll tell me first.”

“Yes.”

Rodney puts his hologram component in standby. Atlantis tells him it’s three hours later when he finds Radek nodding off over his table. His bones and joints, nonexistent as they are, ache for him. 

+++

The next day he’s out there again to find his warbler. Not just any warbler, but a black-throated blue warbler. 

data: current to Earth year 2003  
data: subset: source: uploaded from Earth computer three days after arrival of expedition  
data: dendroica caerulescens  
data: breeding ground: summer: northeastern United States and southeastern Canada  
data: subset: prefers mixed deciduous and coniferous woodlands  
data: winter: Caribbean  
data: subset: prefers dense tropical forest   
data: food: insects  
data: food: small berries  
data: appearance: wingspan: 17-20 cm   
data: appearance: weight: 8-12 g  
data: appearance: thin bill  
data: appearance: male: deep blue with black face and flanks

“Yes, I’ve already got all that,” Rodney says to – someone. Himself, he thinks. He always has a lot of data stored in his head, especially about the birds. The one that he’s been tracking is definitely a male, and it shouldn’t be anywhere near the west coast at all, much less in British Columbia. This is utterly unprecedented. 

Today, he looks both ways before crossing the runners’ path through the park. There’s a flash of blue on the lower branches of a tall oak hanging over the path, and binoculars at the ready, Rodney steps toward it.

“Fore!” someone shouts out, passing in a magnified blur of black fabric and hair and tanned skin, and the warbler flits away with a “zoo zoo ZEE!” and Rodney yells, “This is not a golf course.” Sheppard waves over his shoulder. 

Rodney watches his long legs eat up the path. They’re runner’s legs, meant to carry a person away, fast and strong like his birds’ wings. He looks to the tree tops and beyond: to the sky where the small songbirds dart between the leaves, where the flocks of blackbirds sway on the currents of the wind, like ocean riptides, back and forth in a harmonized motion of grace and economy. Above them, a hawk circles high and lazy, and above the hawk, or maybe it’s below him, Rodney sees in his mind’s eye:

data: tachycineta bicolumus  
data: subset: extinct

and he says out loud into the middle of the forest, “No, that’s not right. It’s a tachycineta bicolor. Right above my head. Dozens of them, not extinct. They’re common tree swallows.” But again he sees, or just knows somehow:

data: tachycineta bicolumus  
data: subset: extinct  
data: subset: nearest earth relation: tachycineta bicolor  
data: subset common name: tree swallow  
data: subset: probability of extinction: 98.21%

+++

Many years after John arrives, the atmosphere will burn away under the virulent fusion of the aging sun. Gases escape, water vapor early on, venting outward into oblivion and space, spiraling ever quicker into the exosphere as the thermosphere dissipates down to the Kármán line, and then beyond. John sleeps on in his protected city-bubble. 

Atlantis tracks it all. Rodney begins to think not in terms of years, but in terms of events, in terms of other numbers, the percentage of oxygen in the air for John to step into, the strength of the shields, the incoming power of the sun to keep the shields steady. 

data: ozone: 78% remaining   
data: ozone: 56% remaining  
data: ozone: 39% remaining  
data: ozone: 18% remaining  
data: ozone: 6% remaining  
data: ozone: cannot locate

He’s long since turned off the hologram. The city tells him that he can use it one hour for every 14.5 hours of sun that she takes in, but this is a changing figure as well. Nothing stays the same here. The stronger the sun’s frantic fusion grows, the more energy the shields draw in. 

data: ratio: 1 to 29.2  
data: ratio: 1 to 18.5  
data: ratio: 1 to 14.5  
data: ratio: 1 to 10.7 

It doesn’t matter anyway. Rodney refuses to use the hologram. Just in case, and in some ways it’s easier not having even the semblance of a body. Visible water on New Lantea has long since evaporated, but the city has millions of references to it. 

image: Rodney McKay: drinking a glass of water  
image: John Sheppard: yelling into radio in the rain  
image: sunrise over the ocean  
image: jumper flying home over ocean  
image: ocean: location: Earth  
image: ocean: location: Lantea  
image: ocean: location: New Lantea  
image: city: rainstorm  
image: subset: city: towers dripping with water 

“I know,” Rodney murmurs to her in a pulse through her systems. He sends her a picture of his old shower, because he can, not because she hasn’t learned how to understand him without them. She responds:

image: city: rainstorm  
image: subset: city: towers dripping with water  
image: subset: child

It takes him a while, a year, a microsecond – time passes unmeasured – to figure this out. “You mean that children used to play in the rain on you? Not in my time. The Ancients?”

image: John Sheppard: speaking: no  
image: city  
image: child  
image: city  
image: child  
image: city  
image: child

“Ok, ok, you’re the child. By the way, I hate it when you use him,” he tells her conversationally, and if she were a person, he’d swear she were laughing at him. “When it rained, you felt like a child.”

An image of John tells him, “That’s not quite it, Rodney,” and Rodney gets an incompatibility message: 

data: city: feelings not within parameters of programming

which Rodney thinks is possibly bull, but he says, “You were a child when it rained,” because she was, in a way. Or at least, it hasn’t rained since she grew old. “You and me both, baby,” he says, and thinks of rain running, like pounding on the eaves of childhood, down Atlantis’s spires. 

The ratio of solar energy intake to hologram energy consumption can be calculated farther into the future: 

data: ratio: 1 to 5.3  
data: ratio: 1 to 2.6  
data: ratio: 1 to 1  
data: ratio: unable to extrapolate

These last few are merely projections. They won’t occur until long after Sheppard has woken up and flung himself back in time. As it turns out, Rodney will never need them. 

+++

When Rodney was young, no older than seventy, he used to imagine what he’d do when Sheppard finally arrived. Thirty years had passed since he’d seen him, and he’d known him four, and it struck him as a huge imbalance. 

Radek used to eye him over his glasses and mutter comments in Czech about idiot heartsick scientists who don’t study the evidence about themselves. Rodney would pretend to ignore these, even if the truth was that thanks to Atlantis, he could understand every word of Radek’s language. Most days it made him laugh to find those familiar hissed imprecations making sudden sense. When he asked Atlantis, she said:

data: unable to compute

and he left Radek a message on his computer that said the exact same thing. 

Initially he had a lot of plans for John’s arrival, only by the time John actually gets here there’s no energy for anything, and besides, Rodney’s remembered that time for John doesn’t work the same way that it does for Rodney. Time counts where John’s come from, and he’s already six months older than his birthdate would say, six months caught in a time dilation field, or possibly six months younger from the time Todd stole and returned years, and Rodney can’t return him any older than he’s supposed to be. 

Because even without time dilation fields and life-sucking, life-granting Wraith, sometimes Rodney thinks that every time they go through the gate, they lose a bit more of John, creating scabs covered over by his smirk. Everything this galaxy takes from them, piece by piece, and maybe their hearts too, and what, he’s supposed to send John right back into that? 

“Yes, you are. You have to,” Atlantis says, or really: 

image: John Sheppard: hands in pocket, slouched against wall: speaking: yeah

It’s actually a more complex data pattern than that. Rodney could break it down into data and image, separate the sound from the picture, since that’s what Atlantis does, but he learned a long time ago to process all the bytes as a composite. 

So he’s standing here in the corridor listening to the wind shriek in its sandstorm cry, waiting for John to stumble through the door back into the city so that he can get him into a stasis pod, and he’s going to send him back. Maybe it’s selfish – to make his own life’s work mean something, or maybe he has to because he’s become a soldier in a time war and this is his discharge of duty, or maybe, maybe it’s because John wants him to. 

Now that he’s not so young, he can admit to making a mistake. He did once before admit such a thing, after he exploded a solar system and killed a man. It’s not that he thought he never made any other mistakes, but that youth, or even human middle age if you live in a place like Atlantis – they don’t leave much time to dwell on regrets. If you start, you never stop. Even now, Atlantis would do it for him if he’d let her.

image: Jennifer Keller  
image: Sam Carter  
image: Ronon Dex  
image: Teyla Emm—

“Would you quit that?” he shoves at her. “You don’t have to take everything so literally.”

“Yes, I do,” an image of John Sheppard tells him. 

McKay’s latest mistake, or last mistake, a mere 48,000 years ago, was to miss the fact glaring right at him, burning a hole in his forehead – that the sun was going to die. On the scale of his mistakes, this is a pretty big one. It’s got to be the stupidest one he’s ever made, the most obvious, and if the solar augmentation of the shields doesn’t work, it’ll be the worst one. Because if John dies in stasis, then Rodney gave his entire life for nothing, a negation of self that would mean nothing, only that you don’t leave men behind, or in this case, ahead of you. 

The thing is that even if Rodney had seen this happening, it wouldn’t have mattered. He couldn’t have moved the city to a safer place because they have to be right here in the end anyway to catch a wave, for John to ride a solar flare home to the past. 

Which just proves Rodney right, again. Jennifer wanted him to let be, believing that what happened happened, but even back then, Rodney knew he was only fixing a mistake that never should have occurred. Atlantis was never meant to burn up here under a dying sun. Of all the ways for the city to go, this is the one he never imagined actually seeing – watching a slow, unavoidable death head her way. He can’t believe that she was ever supposed to stay here because she was never meant to land here. She only ran out of energy and fell from the sky like a bird with broken wings.

+++

On Friday, after Sheppard manages to cause another ruckus and send his black-throated blue warbler fleeing yet again, Rodney stalks back to the parking lot and waits for him there. He makes notes in his laptop until Sheppard strolls out of the woods, water bottle in hand, and heads to a beat up Tacoma.

“Hah,” Rodney says. “I knew that was your vehicle. You owe me a cup of coffee.”

Sheppard blinks. “I do?”

“Yes.” Rodney crosses his arms and tries to look confident. 

“If you insist,” Sheppard says with an ironical arch of his eyebrows. 

“Good.” Rodney follows him into town to the diner. Once seated – Sheppard smiles charmingly at the waitress – Rodney says, “It’s a dendroica caerulescens. Do you have any idea how rare it is to see such a thing out here? Now you and I are here to have a little chat about how important it is that I get a picture of this bird before it moves onto other areas. I mean, it might choose us as its breeding ground for the summer, but I can’t find its nest so I have no way to verify that and you don’t want to be the one who stands in the way of my Nobel, do you? No, I didn’t think so. Not that this bird itself is my Nobel, maybe just my Roger Tory Peterson Award Promoting the Cause of Birding or, oh, I wouldn’t mind a Ludlow Griscom Award Outstanding Contributions in Regional Ornithology either, not that Canada doesn’t have its own prestigious awards, but I think the Nobel committee is—”

“I’m not going to stop running,” Sheppard interrupts.

Rodney inhales his coffee. Diner coffee, yuck, but still, coffee. “Just go run somewhere else,” and if he feels a slight twinge of disappointment at this prospect, he ignores it because he has to keep his eye on the bigger picture here.

“What’s the bigger picture?” asks Sheppard. His lips twist into a little smile, and Rodney tilts his head and says, “Have we met?”

Sheppard gives him a funny look before ordering waffles with berries. After the waitress leaves, he says, “Uh, no.”

“Are you sure?” but even Rodney’s not. It was just a moment. 

“I’m John Sheppard. We met last week. I like college football, Ferris wheels, and anything that goes faster than 200 miles per hour.”

image: John Sheppard: location: puddle jumper: flying as fast as his mind allows him to

which, Rodney remembers with a jolt, is pretty damn fast. He also remembers squinching his eyes shut as the ocean whizzed past underneath him, spray leaping up to tag the jumper's belly, and yelling at John to stop joyriding. He remembers John’s dirty laughter. 

Sometimes John flew as fast as he could, just to do it, not to get anywhere, not to accomplish something, but just because he loved it. Rodney never understood that, but maybe he’s beginning to. 

When he looks back at Sheppard across the cheap diner table, Sheppard’s staring out the window. His eyes chase after a white plume of jet exhaust. 

+++

When he’s a newly loaded program in Atlantis, before he goes into his long hibernation to wait for John, he counts in years, like Radek and Madison. Maybe the better way would have been to count by events, to measure time by seasons – when Woolsey left and went back to Earth; when the expedition became fully militarized; when Madison told him she was going back and trying to take Radek, over ninety years old by then, with her; when they finally killed Michael, far too late. 

“I don’t know why you’re still here,” Rodney said to Radek. “You should have left a long time ago. Madison never should have come. I tried to tell her that years ago.”

Radek smiled at him. His fingers were too crabbed to type anymore, but he used his stylus on the memory boards. His hand curled around the stylus the same way it did around the whittling knife he used to carve wooden figures. “I could not leave, Rodney. You know that.”

Rodney shook his head. “It doesn’t matter to her. Don’t you understand, she’s just a machine. You don’t matter to her. She doesn’t care if you stay or go, no matter what you do for her to keep her running.”

“Ano,” Radek said ruefully. Shavings of wood fell to the metal floor. “I don’t do it for her.” They both knew he was lying. Of all of them, in some ways Radek always loved her best, maybe because she was so inaccessible to him without the gene and so he had to fight harder for her, nothing easy, nothing taken for granted. 

Rodney asks the city, “Do you know what love is?” and she flashes back:

image: John Sheppard: location: infirmary: Ronon Dex, Teyla Emmagan, Rodney McKay sitting around him  
image: Rodney McKay: speaking: do you think he’s going to be all right  
image: Teyla Emmagan: speaking: I know it  
image: Rodney McKay: speaking: you don’t know that, medically  
image: Teyla Emmagan: speaking: then I believe it 

and Rodney, stymied, admits, “Okay, maybe something like that.”

After he goes into hibernation, he doesn’t count time at all until he wakes up to the time of John Sheppard’s arrival. The 48,000 years before that become “the time before John,” and the 857 years after that become “while John’s in stasis.” All the while his program is running, for the twenty-eight years after he’s loaded into the city before Radek shuts him down, and for the day that John’s there with him, talking, and for the 857 years that Rodney keeps him in stasis – for all this time, Rodney is waiting. Expecting, anticipating. He still has things to do: wait for John, calibrate the sensors, run new calculations for the solar shield, maintain power at all costs to the stasis pod with the naquadah generator, make sure the shields don’t fail, get John out, get John home at the right time. 

When he and John are walking down to the pod, John stops and stoops over something lying in the sand. He picks up a horned conch shell streaked iridescent peach and purple. 

image: city sinking  
data: city sunk: 42,293 years ago  
image: underwater ocean: sensor location: control tower  
data: subset: past data: all systems normal

which Rodney’s pretty sure means that Atlantis was happy under the water, the cool currents licking her on all sides. It’s like flying, in a way.

“They sank her a long a time ago when they left,” he tells John.

“Who’s they?” Sheppard holds the shell to his ear. 

Rodney watches enviously. “I don’t know. She says they’re not human. I think we sank her, too, before we left for the last time, whenever that was, but they came and raised her again.” He gets an image of tall creatures in his head, dressed in fancy, fussy clothes that look dark and rich and elaborately coiffed. Like Rodney’s own people, they found her a myth, and left her one too, a whisper of a legend. 

“Civilizations that are in decline,” he says to John, “tend to also be civilizations that focus on the trivial things. Beauty, appearance. Look at the riches of Rome while it was falling, or the Byzantine Empire. These people, the ones who sank her last, they were beautiful.”

John looks at him and raises a brow. “History? Sociology? What’s come over you, McKay?”

“Can it, Sheppard.” But Rodney’s mouth quirks up. “Hey, what do you hear in the shell?” and John says, “The sea, of course.”

Atlantis creaks around them, dry, and Rodney reaches for the shell before he remembers he can’t touch it, and John says, “Yeah, well, we gotta get a move on,” because there are things to do.

All his 48,000 years, there have always been things to do. When John leaves, flings himself home, that will become the time “after John.” He’s waiting for it, waiting for it, and he doesn’t know what he’ll do once it comes.

+++

In the time before John, while Rodney slept his dreamless sleep, the water evaporated and burned off. In some places of the city, this happened before the energy ran out and the shields fell. In other parts, as when Elizabeth led their expedition through the eight-chevron wormhole, the shield failed and let in the remaining sea. That’s why there are shells. 

Rodney looks with the sensors over the desert outside. He can talk to John while he’s outside pushing through the sandstorm, but that’s as far out as he can get. He is limited to the walls of the city, and all the things the city can tell him:

data: air pressure: data: air pressure: 1559.34 hPa and falling  
data: wind velocity: 52.3 kn and rising   
data: temperature outside city: 322.3 K  
data: subset: temperature inside city: 313.1 K

These things only make him long to feel the hot wind on his skin, to let the sun beat down on his face, to let it burn him fierce and red, radiation poisoning be damned, to see the bleached bones of the animal burial grounds so near the city with his own eyes. He doesn’t care that her sensor-eyes are far more sensitive than his human ones ever were.

The city rested in the deepest trough of the sea so it was the last place to dry out entirely, the last watering hole, but that didn’t matter anyway because in the end she sat in a poisonous stew of salt and minerals. She tells Rodney of how she desiccated, how for the first time in her long life her membranes shriveled and dried and became covered in a yellow grit that sandpapered her skin and cut into her and gave her fevers. 

image: Atlantis  
image: Atlantis: in desert  
image: subset: infirmary: patient with fever

Rodney shakes his head. “You don’t have membranes. What are you, some sort of Wraith Hive?” and she shudders in his mind. “Yeah, I didn’t think so. Also, you don’t get fevers.” 

Atlantis heat-shivers as a solar flare passes around her shields, causing them to burn yellow-red as they cradle Sheppard. They are still in the time of “while John’s in stasis” and Rodney has to peer into the blur of years, to find the math, in order to know that he’s been there 824 years. 

“I think we’re getting close now,” he says, and Atlantis nods.

“City,” says Rodney, his mental-voice expansive with awe. “Membranes, fevers, the way you feel dried out. Are you imagining things?”

+++

The following week Rodney sits on a stump and waits for Sheppard to pass by. But Sheppard stops and jogs in place to talk to Rodney for a few minutes. “You could join me,” he offers. 

“Hah!” Rodney says, not at all amused. “Despite what you may think, I don’t just hang around here to stare at the trees. I’m doing things.” He holds up his notebook. It’s got a string looped through it so it can hang from his neck. There’s a pen tied to it. 

Sheppard hops back and forth on his feet. “When was the last time you heard your bird?”

Rodney glares at him. “Two days ago,” he snaps. “It’s still here, and I need proof. They’re only going to believe me if I have a photo because it’s not supposed to be here. This isn’t supposed to happen.”

“Well, I believe you,” Sheppard says with an easy smile.

“Right, which does me a lot of good,” and maybe Rodney’s still grumbling but he can’t help but look to the sky a bit more hopefully anyway.

Sheppard jogs a little circle around Rodney as he tells him that it’s not always about numbers. “Reality isn’t always about proof, about what you can see and hear. Sometimes it’s about what you know. What you believe, what you choose to make real.” He stops and presses his hands to Rodney’s shoulders. “I think there are whole worlds out there to explore.”

“Oh my god,” Rodney says. “Are you telling me you believe in aliens?” 

Sheppard grins and begins a slow jog down the path away from Rodney. “Yup,” he tosses over his shoulder, and Rodney has no idea if he’s sincere or not, and he sputters after him and shouts, “Yeah, well, well so do I!”

+++

“You should go back to Earth where it’s safe. Safer,” he amends. Radek ignores him.

“Zelenka,” he says insistently. 

“Did you know that the marines think I talk to myself?” Radek taps his foot on the floor and drops a few more wood curls. He chuckles. “You’re too good at staying out of their sight.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not exactly supposed to be hanging around, as you’ve pointed out. But.” Rodney pauses. “I think it’s time. I want you to turn my program off.”

“Do it yourself,” says Radek, crotchety. “Why now?”

Because Rodney doesn’t want to be the last one left, doesn’t want to be the last man. He crouches in front of Radek’s chair. “I want you to do it. I’ve already rechecked my program. When anyone comes through the gate, the sensors will scan for Sheppard’s subcutaneous chip and reboot me. Then he’ll have to initiate the hologram the first time, but once I’m back up and running, I can do that myself at will.” He doesn’t say that he’s terrified by the thought of going under, but then, Radek already knows that. 

Radek studies him. His eyes are cloudy at the edges now. “I’m not going to leave just because you shut down.”

“I didn’t say I thought you would.” Although he can hope. 

“Ask me again in a month.”

Rodney has wondered what oblivion will feel like, and realized even in the same instant that oblivion must feel like nothing. He thought, back when he was starting this project, about creating a virtual reality program to go with the whole package he was assembling, but rejected that idea because first, it would take too much energy from the ZPM to run continuously for who knew how many years, and second, it would have taken too long. 

Later he asked the city why she didn’t have one and she told him that the Ancients had deemed it unnecessary. 

“But then you could have imagined,” he said.

Image: John Sheppard: speaking: no

she said back. A VR would still be a program, limited by its own parameters. 

+++

When he sends John back through the wormhole and “after John” time begins, Atlantis says to him:

query: image: Rodney McKay: program: terminate

Rodney recoils. 

query: image: John Sheppard: speaking: why not, Rodney

“I don’t need to,” he tells her. 

data: analysis: correct  
query: image: John Sheppard: speaking: I don’t think there’s anything we can do here.   
image: John Sheppard: speaking: Let’s go. What are we waiting for?

Rodney doesn’t know what he’s waiting for. He’s waited out his years and done what he was meant to do, he hopes – there’s no way to know if John’s now changed the events of Rodney’s past and started a new, the right, timeline. But that doesn’t mean he’s ready to go. Because this time, if he shuts down his programs the way Radek did so long ago, there’s nothing to bring him back. Eventually the city will burn up with the planet, engulfed by the dying sun, and he’ll go with her. 

image: city under attack: shields up: weapons’ fire bursting across the surface  
image: city under attack: shields down: fires red and black spanning the towers  
image: John Sheppard: location: puddle jumper  
image: subset: John Sheppard: location: puddle jumper: hit by fire  
image: subset: John Sheppard: location: puddle jumper: spiraling out of control  
image: subset: John Sheppard: location: puddle jumper: burning up  
data: subset: John Sheppard: location: puddle jumper: sound: metal shrieking  
image: city: burning

Rodney feels as though he’s been socked in the gut, because before his eyes, John is burning, twisting out of the sky, falling into the sea with a great hiss.

“City,” he chokes out, and he wants to silence her, hush, baby, hush, “That never happened. You’re imagining things again.”

data: calculation: future projection: probability: 99.99%

“Except that there’s no ocean left,” he reminds her, and he laughs quietly, grimly for her. “I get it, though. This is the way we’ll go down.” 

image: ZPM  
image: city: flying away from planet

and Rodney thinks of how much he wants to touch something, how much he wants to get out of her fiery metal walls – to escape – not from her, not ever from her, but to get away from this place, to fly into the currents of the wind. 

They dream of the same things – maybe it is Rodney who has taught her to imagine – to leave this dying star, to fly free, and they are entangled, he in her and she in him.

But in the meantime, at least he has this, his consciousness. If he shuts down the program, then “after John” is all that’s left. It was bad enough the first time when he knew he was coming back. “I’m not doing any harm,” he says. “For the first time, we have all the energy we could need now that we’re not using the shields to keep our little puddle of atmosphere trapped in here.”

+++

“Birds are the stuff of legends,” Rodney tells John over coffee. They’re back in the diner. They meet here a couple times a week after John’s done running. Sometimes he drives the short distance home and showers before coming back, but if he got a later start than usual, he skips that and gives Rodney a shrug that says “what can you do?”

Secretly, Rodney likes the days John comes in smelling of the outside – the wind and sun and woods and yes, even his own perspiration. He smells alive in a way that Rodney doesn’t find elsewhere. He’s not sure why. The air smells recycled where he lives, or like he’s not smelling it at all but only sensing a memory.

data: ozone: cannot locate  
data: oxygen: cannot locate

“Legends, huh. That why you’re so interested in them?” John takes a bite of his waffle.

“No. I don’t know – it feels like I’ve always been fascinated by them. For more years than I can count. The legends are incidental.” Rodney can’t remember how long he’s been birding. “But there’s the firebird, Zhar Ptitsa, and the phoenix. Ba, the griffin, Garuda, Hugin and Munin, the roc. They’re all myth.”

John looks up at him. “Maybe they were real once,” and Rodney thinks:

data: dendroica caerulescens  
data: subset: probability of extinction: 99.3%

“I like to fly,” John says.

+++

He wakes Sheppard up four hours before the solar flare is supposed to hit. Just in case. It’s selfish of him, probably. He could have waited until there’s only an hour left, and Sheppard was thirsty when Rodney put him in stasis. He’s going to wake up thirsty and Rodney has no water to give him. 

“Good to see you, Rodney,” is the first thing he says. Relief colors his voice, rusty. “I thought I might be stuck in there forever with no way to get out.”

“Actually, if you got stuck in there, you really wouldn’t have wanted to get out because that would have meant that it was a lot worse outside the pod than inside.”

John looks like he wants to thwack the back of his head, only doesn’t dare. Rodney forgets that he looks like his sixty-five year old self. “The point is,” John says, “that I don’t like the idea of oblivion.”

Rodney walks him to the nearest transporter to get him to the gateroom. “None of us do,” he tells John, and Atlantis hums in the back of his head. He spent a good chunk of “while John’s in stasis” time getting this one transporter to work so that John could get back to the gateroom without having to go back outside, since that would have defeated the entire plan.

They sit on the stairs in the gateroom. “What now?” John asks. 

“We wait. Can’t dial yet. The wormhole has to engage at the exact moment the flare hits.”

John slants a look at him. “That’s not what I meant. What about you?”

“Oh,” Rodney says breezily. “There are always things to do. Atlantis is endlessly fascinating,” and as he says it, he realizes it’s true. Millennia and there’s still more to explore right here, within her. All that wasted time, 48,000 years when he didn’t dream. He’s got a lot of catching up to do.

When John leaves, he reaches out to Rodney for a friendly slap on the shoulder, a “hey, thanks, McKay” for services rendered, no big deal. The way one does, except that his hand sweeps through Rodney’s body, and Rodney says, “yeah,” and wonders who the last person he touched was.

+++

A month later, he’s peering through his binoculars, up to the blue, blue sky, when Sheppard slings his arm around his shoulders. 

“Ew, gross,” Rodney exclaims, but he doesn’t move away. Sheppard’s all sweaty from his run. 

“Take a break,” and then, “Hey, you want me to take you up sometime? We could go, fly alongside your birds,” as if the idea’s just occurred to him when Rodney’s willing to bet that he’s been pondering it for a few weeks now. “I pilot charter planes. I told you that, right?”

Rodney’s not sure, but he’s not surprised. “I don’t trust those things. Death traps. I hate flying on anything smaller than a 747.”

“Aw, come on, McKay. How do you cross smaller distances?”

“That’s what cars are for. In a pinch – I’m talking emergency here – I can do planes.” He shudders. 

Sheppard rests his head on his shoulder. It should seem more out of place than it does. “I have a great puddle jumper. Do you trust me?”

“No,” Rodney wants to say, to this person he’s known less than two months, but somehow “yes” comes out of his mouth. He can feel Sheppard’s smile. 

“Then let’s go flying.”

Rodney points to the sky. “See them?” He tips Sheppard’s chin up. “That’s the corvus caurinus, more commonly known as the northwestern crow. And above the flock, that’s a cooper’s hawk. Accipiter cooperii. And somewhere out there is my bird, my black-throated blue warbler.” He leans against Sheppard’s chest, content to watch the birds swoop across the sky, graceful on invisible air currents.

“I dream about flying,” Sheppard says. His breath is hot against Rodney’s ear. 

Rodney nods. “Dreaming is a peculiarly human trait. Other animals dream, but not the way we do. We imagine. It’s what separates us from animals, machines, everything else. Even the smartest computer is just a machine as long as it can’t imagine.”

“Hey, Rodney,” John says, still talking into his ear. “I think your birds are wrong.” He slides his hand down Rodney’s arm and laces his fingers through Rodney’s, and then lifts their joined hand to the sky. “That’s the Lantean crow, or the gyalu, the corvus carinum, probability of extinction 74.56%. And that one, your hawk, that’s a New Lantean hawk, probability of extinction 100%,” and Rodney stares at him, his mouth askew.

+++

He stumbles back and activates his hologram for the first time in a thousand-odd years. 

“Rodney,” she says:

image: John Sheppard stepping through gate into dead city  
image: John Sheppard walking down the corridor with Rodney McKay: status: hologram  
image: Rodney McKay: status: hologram: putting John Sheppard into stasis  
image: Rodney McKay: status: hologram: sending John Sheppard back through the gate

“We did what we had to do,” she is telling him, “and now let go and come. Join me in my dreams. Let go, Rodney.”

He flashes back to her:

image: bird  
image: desert  
image: bird falling from sky  
image: bird dying in desert 

and she says:

image: ZPM: data: depleted

They’re not going anywhere except into the realm of imagination. “It’s not logical,” Rodney insists. “You don’t have an imagination.”

data: analysis: correct

“But you do,” she says, and John holds out his hand and says, “Do you trust me?”

“If I do this, I don’t have any failsafes. I don’t have any way to come back.” 

He feels her laughter tremble though all of his systems as she shows him:

image: city: location: desert  
image: eastern view of city  
image: subset: mostly submerged  
data: subset: material of submersion: sand  
image: desert  
image: southern view of city  
image: subset: mostly submerged  
data: subset: material of submersion: sand  
image: desert  
image: western view of city  
image: subset: mostly submerged  
data: subset: material of submersion: sand  
image: desert  
image: northern view of city  
image: subset: mostly submerged  
data: subset: material of submersion: sand  
image: desert  
data: subset: time of image: current   
data: star, nearest: sun: hydrogen shell: expanding  
data: subset: star, nearest: sun: temperature: dropping  
data: subset: star, nearest: sun: core temperature: rising  
data: solar system: M45-981: engulfed by star, nearest: sun  
data: solar system: P9X-111: engulfed by star, nearest: sun  
data: solar system: P2Y-224: engulfed by star, nearest: sun  
image: solar system: P2Y-224: gone  
image: star, nearest: sun: orange halo

“I know,” he says, and she says, “Do you know what love is?” and she uses his own images against him:

query: image: Rodney McKay: status: hologram: speaking: do you know what love is  
image: John Sheppard: location: infirmary: Ronon Dex, Teyla Emmagan, Rodney McKay  
sitting around him  
image: Rodney McKay: speaking: do you think he’s going to be all right  
image: Teyla Emmagan: speaking: I know it  
image: Rodney McKay: speaking: you don’t know that, medically  
image: Teyla Emmagan: speaking: then I believe it  
query: image: Rodney McKay: status: hologram: speaking: do you know what love is  
image: Rodney McKay: speaking: okay, maybe something like that

“You just want me to believe you?” he says to her, looking out the window into the desert. Without the atmosphere, nothing looks as it once did. Great winds sweep the surface of the planet and scour away even the endless sand. The city herself is slowly being ripped apart by their force. Long before she burns up in the sun’s hydrogen, she’ll be scattered to the winds. Rodney won’t let her run that calculation.

“I want you to imagine,” John says, sweaty in his runner’s pants. He holds out a photograph of a black-throated blue warbler. This is the time of “decision” and it lasts for a nanosecond and a millennium, a breath and a lifetime. With a glance behind him at the gate, at the city’s great windows, Rodney shuts off his hologram, terminates his program, and reaches out and takes the photograph. 

+++

The black-throated blue warbler chirps its way from tree to tree, deeper into the forest. It flits here and there to twitter its beak in a puddle of rainwater. Above it, songbirds gather on the wind and surf it high and low, weightless, lifted under the wings into the sky’s infinity.

This is the way birds fly.


End file.
